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Leiter Looks Back at the Mets and Feels a Sense of Betrayal

According to family legend, the first major league baseball game Al Leiter ever saw was at the home opener at Shea Stadium in 1970, when the Mets raised their inaugural World Series banner and a 4-year-old boy in attendance picked his team for life.

The allegiance was interrupted yesterday when Leiter completed a one-year, $7 million contract with the Florida Marlins, then revealed the bitter nature of his negotiations with the Mets over the past three weeks. Leiter said he accepted a contract offer last month from Omar Minaya, the Mets' first-year general manager, but had to wait two days to hear back from Minaya, who then rescinded the offer. As a result, Leiter joined a long line of aging sports stars who are dismissed unceremoniously by a new executive looking to put a fresh imprint on his franchise.

"I did not want to leave the Mets and I did not want to leave New York," Leiter said yesterday in a telephone interview. "The reason I am leaving is that Omar Minaya did not want me."

Leiter said he could understand why Minaya would cut ties with a 39-year-old starting pitcher who has had recent arm trouble. Minaya had cut loose John Franco, traded Mike Stanton and tried to trade Mike Piazza and Cliff Floyd. With an obvious effort under way to replace a significant number of the team's veterans, Leiter did not want to be viewed as a charity case. He was satisfied with Minaya's decision to let him go, but said he felt hurt and betrayed by the way the decision was handled.

Shortly after Minaya was hired on Sept. 29, Leiter and his representatives, Randy and Alan Hendricks, approached him about drawing up a one-year contract for 2005. Leiter planned to retire after next season and could envision his send-off at Shea Stadium. He had grown up in a family full of Mets fans in New Jersey, spent the past seven seasons with the team and became an ambassador for the franchise on the field and off. It seemed there was nowhere else for him to go.

At the time, Minaya had a handful of issues on his agenda, including a managerial search, and he told Leiter that negotiations would have to wait. In early November, Minaya renewed conversations with the Hendricks brothers, and on Nov. 15, when he declined Leiter's $10.2 million contract option for 2005, no one was surprised. The Mets instead offered Leiter a one-year guaranteed contract worth $4 million, with $3 million more in easily attainable incentives.

Leiter thought the deal was reasonable, but on Nov. 16, the first day he was eligible for free agency, he said that Minaya called and gave him a deadline of 6:30 p.m. Nov. 19 to accept the offer. Irritated by what he felt was an artificial deadline, Leiter called his mother and brother for advice and said he asked them: "Is this what it comes down to? Seven years and it's a take-it-or-leave-it three days into free agency?"

"You put deadlines on people you really don't want, because that's how you feel about them," Leiter said yesterday.

For the first time, Leiter questioned if the Mets really wanted him back, and he started examining other avenues. He had lunch with the Yankees' general manager, Brian Cashman, who also offered about $4 million with $3 million in incentives. He spoke with the Marlins' owner, Jeffrey Loria, who offered a guaranteed $7 million. On the afternoon of Nov. 19, a Friday, Leiter called Minaya to ask for more time and met resistance. He also called Loria, who was working with a looser deadline, and said Loria had told him: "I understand. Take it through the weekend."

Leiter had received phone calls from the Boston Red Sox, the Philadelphia Phillies, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the St. Louis Cardinals and the San Francisco Giants, but no one seemed to believe that he would truly leave the Mets, himself included. When Leiter woke up on Nov. 20, he thought of the stadium he visited as a 4-year-old and called Alan Hendricks. No matter what sort of relationship he would have with Minaya, he had developed a respect for the team's new manager, Willie Randolph, dating to their days with the Yankees, had grown close to the pitching coach Rick Peterson last season and counted his teammates Tom Glavine and Steve Trachsel as friends.

Leiter told Alan Hendricks to tell Minaya that he was going to remain a Met. Even though the offer was slightly lower than some of the others he had received, his place was at Shea. Leiter said Hendricks left this message on Minaya's voice mail at 10 a.m. Nov. 20, 16 hours after the imposed deadline: "We've got great news. Al is coming back. Call us. Let's do a press conference."

Leiter waited for a congratulatory call from Minaya through that night and the next day. He said that Minaya did not call Hendricks until 1:30 p.m. Nov. 22, when Minaya indicated that he was considering other options and needed to speak with Leiter. During a conversation that afternoon, Minaya told Leiter that he had a trade in the works. Leiter responded by asking Minaya the question that had been on his mind for almost a week: "Do you really want me on the team?"

Minaya, after all, was an assistant general manager who had pushed for the Mets to acquire Leiter from the Marlins in 1998, and he celebrated when Leiter helped the team reach the playoffs in 1999 and the World Series in 2000. The club's principal owner, Fred Wilpon, and senior executive vice president, Jeff Wilpon, were extremely loyal to Leiter. Minaya said he had to convince the Wilpons that it was in the team's best interest to let Leiter go and to pursue Pedro Martínez, Boston's free-agent pitcher, even though Martínez is in a different salary bracket.

At the end of their phone conversation on Nov. 22, Minaya and Leiter agreed to announce that they had come to a mutual decision to halt negotiations and, in effect, part ways.

"As a general manager, you have to make some tough decisions," Minaya said. "And this was one of those tough decisions I had to make."

After Leiter and Minaya canceled a lunch they had scheduled for the next day, Leiter stewed in his Manhattan home and let every phone call go straight to voice mail. He reflected on criticism he received last season, when he ranked 10th in the major leagues with a 3.81 earned run average but was accused of influencing the Mets' personnel decisions.

"For a guy supposedly running the organization, who had the owner's ear and the general manager's ear, where were those ears in the end?" Leiter said.

When he finally came to the realization that his boyhood dream would not end the way he had planned, Leiter thought of South Florida, where so many New Yorkers escape. He helped Florida win the 1997 World Series, threw the first no-hitter in Marlins history in 1996 and kept a home in Weston, Fla. Leiter met Loria for dinner after he spoke with Minaya and brought along his wife, Lori. He wanted to introduce her to the man who would become his next boss.

Leiter had an opportunity to join the Yankees, but he thought it better to leave New York altogether. He will probably relocate his family to Weston and take his three children out of their private school in Manhattan. This is the way it ends for many elite players and, despite appearances, Leiter is no different.

When the contract with the Marlins was finally announced yesterday, Florida General Manager Larry Beinfest talked about the feel-good negotiations he had with Leiter. Beinfest said that the club would also make a sizable donation to Leiter's Landing, a charitable foundation, and that the money would be channeled to South Florida. Leiter even left open the possibility of putting off retirement for another year to work with the Marlins' young pitchers. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was among those in New York who called Leiter yesterday to say goodbye.

There will still be plenty of chances to see him next year. Because Florida is in the National League East, Leiter will make three trips to Shea Stadium, where it all began, and where he always thought it would end.

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A version of this article appears in print on December 9, 2004, on Page D00001 of the National edition with the headline: BASEBALL; Leiter Looks Back at the Mets and Feels Betrayed. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe